The Indie Informer

Stick with me here, but reviewing Dead Take puts me in mind of another review from this week: Tales of the Shire. It’s a wild Yin and Yang situation as one couldn’t be more cozy and the other might keep you up at night. It’s not just the difference in themes or tones, though. It’s in the games’ strengths and weaknesses, which feel like mirror opposites.

Dead Take‘s phenomenal, haunting, and mesmerizing FMV performances deserve every bit of the praise they’ll receive and more. They wash away almost every other sin by the end. Almost. The bulk of the first-person psychological horror, its gameplay, is largely sufficient. The puzzles are competent and progress unfolds in a linear, logical manner. Lack of an explicit quest log and map, however, led me to memorable stretches of aggravation. That didn’t keep me from being lured farther and farther into the evocative narrative. I couldn’t leave until I reached the dark center of its maze, and then I wished — for the protagonist’s sake — that I hadn’t led him there.

Dead Take digs six feet into the darkest dirt of Hollywood. Fame, rejection, power, loss, corruption, worship, and atrocity find their spotlight during the six hours it took me to roll credits. It plays like familiar survival horror games, pushing the player to decipher clues and find key items to unlock various rooms in a suspiciously vacated Los Angeles mansion. I’m looking for a fellow actor, a friend, who attended a party at the palatial residence the night before. Now, he isn’t answering his phone.

The heart of both the mansion and the game beats in the theater room. The contents of discoverable media drives splatter through the projector and onto the silver screen — capturing moments of pain, triumph, bitterness, and betrayal. The dripping red portrait of the characters and, above all, the monstrous structures preying on them, is painted brushstroke by agonizing brushstroke.

Finding these drives pushed me near madness a few times myself, and not for the best reasons. The projection room helpfully displays, slightly obscured, blueprints of the house and a corkboard which enigmatically fills up with many vital clues I discover in the house. Not being able to access them when I’m away exploring is not ideal.

In one of my most head-banging moments, I could not for the life of me figure out what to do with an everyday object. It was clearly important, considering how I received it. I retraced every step, rechecked every room, and followed any little hope to figure out what I should be doing. Finally, I happened to look up slightly higher than before in the last room and realized there was something interactable there. I didn’t have my head in the world anymore and I had to take a moment to shake off my frustration.

Dead Take‘s consuming conclusion overshadowed any problems I had with the design, however. The developers gave me a brilliant reason to see the world through a radically new lens. My fresh perspective transformed my luxurious surroundings into a house of horrors, growing darker with every step. The performances, disturbing and spectacular, ensured I’d walk away replaying them in my head.